How to bring a city alive?

[stevelabny]

Literally.

While, reading the Sharn book I began toying with this idea. (Which has probably been bouncing around my head since I saw an "Animate City" spell somewhere in the last week)

What if Sharn was alive? A sentient being in itself. Capable of subtly influencing the goings on. I haven't really worked out the ramifications at all, but it just seemed like an interesting take on why such an oddly built, twice abandoned city, has become such the vital piece of Khorvaire that it is today.

Is it a benevolent or malevolent creature? Does it feed on the happiness of its citizens or their pain and despair? What is its ultimate goal? What exactly can it "do"? And how did it come to be?

Ideas don't have to be Sharn-specific but I am also curious about applying this idea specifically to Sharn.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I once used a building as a vampire, feeding of the life force of those inside, the energy/hit points went to fuel the spells. I have also taken to dungeons along the line of Dungeon Keeper, the computer game, where the dungeon is a single spell that opens a portal into the world.

for Sharn, I would think about making it a lesser god, where the city provides spells for its care takers (PrC). The question is who are those care takers and their functions?

 

[Ry]

Cool subtle tricks for the city:

Have it send "bad feelings" about particular streets, and "good feelings" about certain alleyways or rooms. Let it fashion a few seamless portals, to capture threats to it in secret mazes, made up of copied parts of the city. This would be a neat take for the poor/underworld of the city, that might use this false-Sharn as a place to hide from authorities.

Actually, here's a neat adventure idea for that: The city occasionally swallows serious threats into these hidden dungeon/demiplanes. But recently it bit off something that's difficult for it to dislodge - a fiend that is starting to take over the false copy-world. So it swallows some PCs to fight back.

"Why is the square empty? Isn't is market time?"
"You know... call it a hunch, but I don't think we're in the city anymore."

 

[shilsen]

Have a couple of recurring buildings (like recurring villains, but ...um, brickier), which appear in a different part of the city on a daily basis. Urban legends would spring up about them. Rewards would be offered for information about them. And they'd eat your PCs. Win, win situation

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Perhaps cities all over the world get so big and interconnected that they form some sort of intelligence and a hive mind - which will eventually turn into its own plane, ripping out large chunks of existing cities in the process to provide the raw material.

This is something I am currently thinking about for Urbis...

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

Danny the Street

Read the Grant Morrison Doom Patrols. Issue 35 includes the first of several appearances by the Danny the Street. Danny is a sentient street, and a transvestite. His rigins are obvious to brits with a smattering of french.


No Obstruction Will Hamper Eminently Righteous Endeavors.

OGM

 

[vulcan_idic]

Literally.

While, reading the Sharn book I began toying with this idea. (Which has probably been bouncing around my head since I saw an "Animate City" spell somewhere in the last week)

What if Sharn was alive? A sentient being in itself. Capable of subtly influencing the goings on. I haven't really worked out the ramifications at all, but it just seemed like an interesting take on why such an oddly built, twice abandoned city, has become such the vital piece of Khorvaire that it is today.

Is it a benevolent or malevolent creature? Does it feed on the happiness of its citizens or their pain and despair? What is its ultimate goal? What exactly can it "do"? And how did it come to be?

Ideas don't have to be Sharn-specific but I am also curious about applying this idea specifically to Sharn.

I think if I were to run this, and I do very much like the idea, so I may, I would make the city have a low level sentience, and not really be truly beneficent or malevolent, but simply have a desire not to be lonely. It wants to be filled with people busling here and there, making it feel alive "feeding" - as it were - simply on being populated. In general, having a sense of self preservation, it would endeavour to attract (perhaps as the enchantment) residents to live in it, preverring ones likely to help keep it in repair, not damage it, but since it values being inhabited above all else if no others were around it would attract any inhabitants - even destructive or merely animals just to be inhabited... I can imagine a city which has filled itself with evil, destructive people for lack of anyone better... until PCs show up (for some deed of daring-do) and in them it finds someone much preferable and so attracts them... the PCs, who had just been visitors with a specific goal now find they have a driving desire to stay... and if and when they descover the truth, how will they feel about being manipulated this way? Violated? Causinng them to utterly destoy the city for it's trespass? Or sympathetic to the cities plight? Causing them to clean out the riff raff and import better inhabitants? Very interesting indeed...